Japan’s economy has been far too stagnant for far too long: everybody can agree on that. The aging population, now used to deflation, prefers saving to spending — an entirely reasonable stance if prices will be lower tomorrow than they are today. So the government has long been facing a very tough task: to change the psychology of a nation, basically. You can’t do that — as Japan learned the hard way — with old-fashioned public-works spending. Instead, you have to target expectations.

Andrew Leonard has a very odd column about Netflix and House of Cards, under the headline “How Netflix is turning viewers into puppets”. Netflix, you see, has lots of data, and it used that data in the commissioning process for the series:

The fight between the Post Office and Congress is a very peculiar one. Normally, when the government owns some incredibly profligate business, it’s Congress which tries to impose efficiency gains and fiscal discipline, while the business insists that all of its spending is absolutely necessary and that it has already cut to the bone. In this case, however, the roles are reversed: the Post Office wants to change, and it’s Congress which is stopping it from doing so.